How to Handle Comments on Your Blog

Janine Popick founded VerticalResponse (now a Deluxe company), provider of online marketing services to small business in 2001 and was the CEO until it was acquired in 2013. She has been a frequent Inc. contributor since 2007 as well as a contributor to the Huffington Post. She’s been featured in USA Today, TIME, Forbes, Businessweek, TechCrunch and Social Media Today. Janine was named 2010 Small Business Person of the Year in San Francisco by the U.S. SBA, and an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist from 2006-2009.
She writes and speaks on topics related to marketing, small business and entrepreneurship and is an active adviser and investor.

I write a blog about how to market a small business. In the past few years, because of a lot of word of mouth and awards for the blog, we’ve started to get a lot of traffic and as a result a lot of comments from those who read it. I moderate all of the comments before they go up. Some people don’t think that I should do that because it’s not so “transparent,” but I moderate because there are a lot of people who post comments just to get a backlink to their sites so they can get better search engine results, which is not what our blog is all about. And then again some people are just nasty.

As long as the comment is constructive, whether positive or negative, I post it. But what about the people who feel they have the right to post mean comments? Who has the time to be posting these? To top it all off, when people post these comments to our blog, chances are the e-mail address they give doesn’t work, so they hide behind a fake address.

Here is a great example of a mean comment:

From: Business Loans

How is it that just anybody can write a article and get as popular as this? Its not like youve said anything incredibly impressive –more like youve painted a pretty picture over an issue that you know nothing about! I dont want to sound mean, here.

Just so you know, I did happen to know about this particular post. And usually people who post mean comments don’t really have a grasp on proper grammar, either.

Here’s what you can do:

When you start your blog, don’t “moderate” the comments; let them come in and see what type of comments you get.

Answer questions people have in the comments, whether positive or negative.

If you start getting “splog” comments like “Great article!” from “Easy Mortgage” or “Love this post, give us more” from “Easy Insurance,” don’t publish them. Chances are that these are people trying to get links back to a specific site from yours to gain search engine traffic. Here’s an example of a splog comment on our e-mail marketing blog:From: Carpet Cleaning Mesa:

Sure thing. The gift of carpet cleaning is always cherished by women and sometimes men. Men seem to not care so much about clean carpet.

If you start getting plain nasty or splog comments, it’s time to turn on moderation. This means you can screen all of the comments and publish the ones that are most relevant to your business.

And if there is a mean comment, go ahead and try to e-mail them back. I answer every mean comment that is submitted to our marketing blog so if it bounces back, I know it’s just someone who wants to be negative or gain for their own purposes.

Maybe it’s the girl in me to take these comments personally, but I get pretty offended by these people who take the time to write blocks of attacking comments. And when I’ve posted comments to other sites myself, I’m sure to give my own credentials. What do you do when this happens?